After lost seasons and close calls, Team Sky leader Chris Froome delivered big in 2013 with five overall stage-race wins, including the Tour de France. Bicycling caught up with the Kenyan-born star as he wrapped up his season and looked to 2014.

Bicycling: Now that the dust has settled after your Tour de France win, how does it feel? Are you still pinching yourself?
Chris Froome: Not really, to be honest. It’s not like I wake up every morning and think, “Damn I won the Tour de France! That’s cool!”

It is an amazing feeling of accomplishment. It’s a great achievement. I know everything I was up against this year and how I was able to ride the race. I’m really proud of how it went. I’m not the kind of guy who looks back. I’m already looking toward next year. My goal as a professional cyclist is simply to be the best cyclist that I can be. That is the way it is for a lot of guys. We’re all out there. And I can’t just put my feet up.

What do you mean when you say, “everything I was up against?”
The Tour had a challenging route this year. We had Corsica, we had crosswinds, we had the mountains, the time trials, and the team time trial. And there was pressure on me from the public around doping. That’s a lot of mental stress with basically everyone calling you a cheat.

And then there were the competitors. It was a strong field. At no moment, until the very end, did I think, “I’ve actually got this wrapped up.”

Back in June you mentioned that the press conferences, the media, and the fans presented a big learning curve for you. Do you feel that you now have a better grip on that?
I have become accustomed to it now. It was really important to target those early races like the Dauphine before the Tour de France to make sure that I was already in that sort of position, to go through the protocol every day of having the media, having the doping control, and then getting back to the hotel just to do more one-on-one interviews.

That was really important this year, but I don’t think I have to go into next year and win everything from the Tour of Oman up to the Tour.

It was a model that worked well in terms of building my morale, building my confidence, building my teammates around me, and all of the rest. But I don’t know that it is something I really have to stress so much in the future.

Obviously I’d like to repeat everything that I did this year. But it was a dream season. It doesn’t happen often that you get to the race and are the strongest. There is a lot more to it than that and I feel really fortunate that I got through the season up until the Tour unscathed.

During the Tour you said that curing your bilharzia (a disease caused by parasites with fatigue as a symptom) was only one of many steps you needed to take to transform yourself into a Tour de France champion.
The bilharzia was huge because in our sport if you are tired and unfit, it is going to be tough. Basically bilharzia is the opposite of EPO. It sucks out the red blood cells and leaves you depleted. And it comes in waves. There are eggs [from the parasite] in your body and once the eggs hatch they start multiplying. That is why I have tests every six months. In fact, it has been awhile. I have to get back to Africa and check that out.
I also spoke with your old trainer, Bobby Julich. He likened working with you to building a ship. At first there were a lot of pieces to put in place, but now that those pieces are in place you can float all alone.
There were a lot of things. Confidence was huge. Because I didn’t believe in myself, I didn’t think I was at the level of others, and I made mistakes. There were days in the mountains, for example, where I did everything perfectly, saved my energy, just everything. I would get to the bottom of the last climb feeling great. But because I didn’t feel like I could go with the big guys when they would go, I often attacked at the bottom to get a head start.

My best hope was that, when the big guys came up, maybe I could just hold on and get a place. But I would never actually wait until the crucial moment when things got really hard and the big guys would start pulling away. And the simple reason is that I didn’t believe in myself.

Bobby said, “Chris, listen, I can see your numbers. I can see that you are capable of being with those front guys and possibly even riding away from them with these numbers. You’ve got to settle down and believe in yourself and play the waiting game until the right moment in the race.”

But even with Bobby telling me that, I still didn’t believe. That was only when I got to the Vuelta in 2011 and was given the job to stay with Bradley [Wiggins]. Naturally with that job in mind I didn’t attack at the bottom of the climb. And I would get three-quarters of the way up the climb and be like, “Hey I actually feel good!”